Posted on 07/27/2015 7:12:58 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Uber is completely revolutionizing the market for urban transportation. Could a similar revolution occur in other fields, including the market for medical care? That’s what University of Chicago economist John Cochrane wondered the other day. But we no longer have to speculate. Uber medicine has already arrived.
There are a number of firms that will bring a doctor to your doorstep at the flick of a cell phone app, including Doctors Making House Calls (North Carolina), Pager (New York City), Heal (Los Angeles) and Medicast (Seattle).
Insurance rarely pays for the service. Like so many other innovations in meeting the medical needs of patients (walk-in clinics, telephone consultations, etc.) these firms cater to patients who pay with their own money.
Take Sarah Sheehan, a Brooklyn resident who was reeling from a painful earache one weekend. Her conventional choices were to endure the hassles and long waits at a hospital emergency room or to wait until Monday morning and take a 45 minute subway ride to reach a doctor’s office. Pager offered her a better option: let the doctor come to her.
Here is how Pager works. Customers pay a $50 fee for their first visit and $200 for subsequent visits from one of the company’s 40 health practitioners, including doctors, nurses and physician assistants. Assuming that first-visit charge is a loss leader, Pager’s service costs a lot more than a typical doctor’s office visit. But it’s a lot less than the national median emergency room charge of $505.
Heal, which launched in the Los Angeles area and has now expanded to San Francisco, promises a doctor within an hour, between the hours of 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., seven days a week. The charge is $99 a visit.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Will the free market win out once again?
Take that you communists!
My Father was an old time family doctor in a rural area and still made house calls up until the 1970s. He also delivered babies at home until the mid1950s.
The crony infested politicians will stomp on this HARD!
It's another battle in the war.
Remember physician-owned hospitals? Under 0'care, they can't be built or expanded.
whoa....
That is what’s needed. Innovation!
Also, it's a boon for the young (who can't yet afford their own cars) and the elderly (who should no longer drive their own cars).
Using Uber is easy, you just open up your app and call a car. You are notified when it arrives at your doorstep so no waiting in the rain or cold. You don't even have to pay the driver. All that is worked out behind the scenes when you arrive at your destination - as you already have your credit card loaded into the app. You basically hit the OK button when you arrive and rate the driver (anything less than 4 stars will likely get the driver put on suspension). Also, no tipping!
Now when you think about Apple and Google testing driverless cars, you can see where this is all heading. Eventually these technologies will merge and we will have driverless cars in all the big cities, waiting for a Uber app (or other competitor) to call them into action.
Now add to that food delivery. You will be able to call any restaurant in the city and place a take-out order. Than you can call up Uber to go there and deliver it to your doorstep. It's already starting to happen.
Now the doctors, as described here. The possibilities are endless.
Too bad a large portion of the population (all can’t do it, I realize that) just doesn’t “opt out” of Obamacare. As the current system operates, some people have to have insurance due to expensive conditions and others will be hit with a large mandate penalty. However, if a good number of people opted out (in spite of all the arm-twisting provisions of Obamacare) and paid cash for their healthcare (the everyday stuff & services as described in the article), Obamacare could be fairly quickly collapsed. Would Congress try to keep it propped up is another question for another day (my answer: I’d bet ‘yes’).
Setting aside catastrophic occurrences (catastrophic policies needed - part of the arm-twist/fear factor that Obamacare did away with them), a lot of folks would be better off because NOW, with Obamacare, costs are going up and people are still going without care or being ‘bankrupted’ with medical costs because they are paying high premiums for nothing ... can’t afford to pay for care out of their own pockets until they meet very high deductibles. If they took the hundreds of dollars a month they are paying for insurance they cannot use and spent it on the healthcare they actually need, they could pay for a lot of their healthcare on their own.
Free market forces, and real competition between providers of this SERVICE (health care), is the only way to sustain a world-class healthcare system.
Say what?!?!? Absolutely ridiculous.
I agree we need to have free market medicine. Uber a pretty bad example, given that it’s about to be regulated out of existence in CA and is facing pretty serious lawsuits everywhere.
That's probably not accurate.
Most of us just can't understand why someone would want things that way.
You made the case answering that question.
Just about any thread here discussing rail travel or driverless cars gets replies from conservatives who see a government plot to get people out of their own cars.
I typically agree with them to a point.
I imagine Obamacare will wither on the vine if this takes off. We will all be required to have “health care insurance”, even though the networks will be narrow and wait lists will be choked, but normal people won’t use it except for catastrophic coverage (kind of like car insurance, homeowners insurance, and other real insurance).
Meanwhile, real doctors will migrate to UberCare, where they will be paid for doing their jobs well and won’t have to deal with anywhere near as much paperwork. I like it, especially since Obamacare rates would finally drop once people stopped using it for routine care. It wouldn’t matter if Obamacare died if it didn’t provide care in a reasonable time window for most situations.
How about this instead: "conservatives recoil at this because they want everybody TO HAVE THE CHOICE to own their own cars and drive themselves AND NOT HAVE THAT CHOICE RESTRICTED BY THE GOVERNMENT"
Huge difference from what you initially wrote. HUGE.
For the most part, I agree with them. Rail travel is definitely not the future. Rail service is 19th Century technology and we need a 21st Century solution to urban transit.
Second, I don't give a crap about these "other threads" you are referring to, nor does your initial post on THIS THREAD make any mention of them. You may (or may not) have had them in your mind when you made your initial comment, but we're not mind-readers here and I can only respond to what you actually wrote on THIS thread.
No real conservative cares if someone freely chooses to not own and/or drive their own personal car. Your initial post on this thread clearly states the opposite of this.
I like this trend. Unless the American people boycott the medical-insurance complex, the system will become increasingly socialistic. I have refused to enroll in Medicare. Medicare, Obamacare, Medicaid - all must be repealed. Just pay cash or better yet, boycott the whole health care system. You’ll live longer.
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